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Why AI Governance

AI agents - Claude, Copilot, Cursor, custom MCP servers - run with the same blast radius as the developer running them. That means access to your filesystem, your secrets, your network, your everything.

This is fine when the agent does what you expect. It's a disaster when:

  • A prompt-injected agent uploads SSH keys to paste.ee
  • A misconfigured MCP server exfiltrates source code to an unknown destination
  • An agent acting on hallucinated instructions pushes a malicious commit to main
  • A coding agent reads your .env and posts it to the model API alongside your code

The standard answer - "don't let agents do that" - doesn't scale. Developers want agents. They'll find a way. The right answer is to put guardrails around the agent's execution environment so it physically cannot exceed its scope.

That's AI governance.

The three pillars

Docker AI Governance gives you three layers of control, defined once in the Admin Console and enforced everywhere agents run.

1. Sandbox policies

Network allowlists, filesystem mount rules, resource limits. Enforced at the proxy and mount layer. The agent never sees data or destinations it isn't allowed to touch.

2. MCP tool governance

Which MCP servers and tools your org's agents can use. Defined centrally, enforced for every developer, audited.

3. Audit + visibility

Every policy decision generates a structured event with user identity, timestamp, session context, and triggering rule. Exports to your SIEM. CISOs get the trail.

What this lab covers

Section What you'll do
The Policy Model Understand how org policies flow to developer machines
Network Enforcement Demo Prove network policies enforce with three curls
Filesystem Enforcement Demo Prove filesystem policies enforce on a credentials directory
MCP Hands-On Register MCP servers locally with sbx mcp
Observability Read the audit log and watch policy decisions live
What's Next Preview audit trails and MCP governance

The lab focuses on Pillar 1 (sandbox policies) because that's what's broadly available today and what you can prove enforces in a short demo. Pillars 2 and 3 are previewed and partially hands-on in the later sections.

By the end you'll have a working, defensible enforcement story you can walk a security team through.